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Leicester
Chronicler A
reflection of past and present thoughts and aspirations |
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Jane West |
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She found writing an "easy and pleasurable task", and when recollecting the earlier years of her writing career she was able to write to Bishop Percy in 1800 that “The catalogue of my compositions previous to my attaining twenty would be formidable. Thousands of lines flowed in easy measure. I scorned correction and never blotted.” |
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Jane West, the
daughter of John Illife and his wife Jane, was born on 30th April 1758 in
London, in the building that was later to become St Paul’s Coffee House.
Little is known of her childhood, but she was eleven years of age when she moved with her
father to the Northamptonshire town of Desborough. Jane fulfilled the typical role of a farmer’s wife, attending to the household and the dairy, but was apparently by no means held in a lowly position. By 1800, her writings were familiar to a wide reading public, both under her own name and also that of her non-de-plume, Mrs Prudentia Homespun. Jane wrote prolifically. Her novels consisted mostly of wry comment and humorous instruction. They included the elderly spinster character, Prudentia, whom Jane created to narrate them. The novel A Gossips Story has been credited as anticipating the style of Jane Austin. Although she wrote numerous plays, they were never performed in her lifetime. By the age of forty she had published no less than six volumes of poems, two tragedies, a comedy and two novels, these being The Advantages of Education’ (1793, 2nd edition 1803) and A Tale of the Times (1799). In 1800 she wrote to Percy, asking him to recommend her works to readers so that she could make better provision for her children. He responded by writing a warm commendation in The British Critic (1801). In that article, Percy wrote how her novels were greatly in demand at three libraries in Brighton. In the same year she published Letters to a Young Man’ in three volumes. These were really addressed to her own son, Edward, although Jane dedicated them to her friend, the Bishop of Dromore. |
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Jane’s
literary output continued unabated, and in 1806 she published two volumes of Letters to a Young Lady.
These were dedicated to the Queen who had purchased Mrs West’s soundly moral novels and
plays. The `young lady’ was Miss Maunsell who died in her twenty-fifth year on
14th August 1808. A second and third edition were published in the same
year and a fourth edition in 1811.
Vol. 92-i (1822)
pp. 162-163. [ Seven ] Commemorative Sonnets." Jane West. Sonnet VI (p. 163) refers
to Jane West's recently deceased son Edward. The sonnets are followed by another poem signed Jane West's habitual signature and dated
from her home at Little Bowden. The baptismal registers for Little Bowden have entries for three children born to Thomas and Jane West: Thomas (1783), John (1787) and Edward (1794). She was obviously well-qualified to write her major poem `The Mother’ (1809) which the Northamptonshire writer Trevor Hold has described as `an early nineteenth century Dr Spock and Agony-Aunt combined.’ An extract from this work is reprinted in Hold’s A Garland of Northamptonshire Poets. Jane was a fervent housewife who believed that home life should take precedence over her writing. In addition to her household, she managed a dairy. By all accounts she was a woman of great character. At the age of 93, she took the rector of Little Bowden to the Ecclesiastical Court for removing her family pew. Jane won, and the rector had to reinstate the pew. In 1819, Jane West visited Dromore. Her husband died on 23rd January 1823. Her last publication Ringrove, or Old-fashioned notions, a novel in two volumes, appeared in 1827. In the introduction she stated that she was writing again after a silence of ten years. Jane died on 25th March 1852 at Little Bowden. Jane West’s poems
were largely inspired by Gray. Her prose writings testified to a hatred of the
new ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and her school. Her literary achievements
seem remarkable considering her lowly background, and her life as a mother and
the wife of a yeoman farmer in a remote Northamptonshire village. (Little
Bowden was at that time part of Northamptonshire and was later transferred to
Leicestershire). At a time when society was largely dismissive of the
views of women, she was able to express publicly, clear feminine, if not
feminist, views on education and parenthood. In achieving this
platform for the opinions of a woman at this time, she must be described as a
`progressive’; yet in her writings she tends to promote conservative and
`old-fashioned’ ideologies in relation to children.
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Her books are located in libraries across the world. The
University of Colorado at Boulder, USA holds a rare edition of her first book
of miscellaneous poetry printed by W.T.Swift in 1782. The Goucher
College at Baltimore, USA holds a rare
two-volume edition of A Gossip's Story (1796). The
library's acquisition notes state that the book is `linked by scholarly
debate to Sense and Sensibility. For the purposes of eighteenth-century
primary source studies, this serious moral fable, written "By the author of
Advantages of Education," reveals themes and characters that were highly
regarded by Jane Austen and her contemporaries'.
Jane outlived her husband and all three of her sons. The family are buried in St Nicholas' churchyard in the village. She described herself as follows: You said. The
author was a charmer Miscellaneous Poems 1791 |
A biography of Jane West, "A profile of Jane West, an Eighteenth-century Author" by Marilyn Wood, was published in 2005 by Paul Watkins Publishing.
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All images and text ©
Stephen Butt 2004-2006. Rev 16/04/06 |